To survive, you must tell stories.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

My soul only knows my spirit.

A happy mind is also a beautiful universal mind.

Being hated isn't easy, you know. You just cannot falter meeting their expectations.

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

That’s the problem with following all the rules—somebody else is eventually going to get ahead by breaking them, and then where will you be?

In this new, hyper competitive age, none of us, none of us can afford to be complacent.

We are afraid that if we stop and really look at God in his Word, we might discover that he evokes greater awe and demands deeper worship than we are ready to give him.

There's no sense in whipping a tired horse, because he'll quit on you. More horses are whipped out of the money than into it.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

It's been proven that fitting more activity into your day can greatly improve your health.